Ocean Ledger

With 2024 almost over, I’m reflecting on our achievements in our first year of operations and I cannot be more proud of the Ocean Ledger team. In retrospect, I’m proud to share that we have successfully developed 6 modular and scalable analytical workflows that have given birth to 13 different data products for coastal ecosystems (e.g. mangroves, seagrasses, corals) and their immensely diverse biophysical and geomorphological environment. Our multi-modal workflows and data products have relied on satellite (3-30m) and aerial remote sensing data (0.5m) input. To put our production and analysis into perspective, we have mapped and analyzed an area equivalent to the land surface of Ireland. This wouldn't have been possible without Jeremiah J. Nieves who single-handedly built our commercial production capabilities; George Malczyk who joined us in September and immediately hit the ground running; and Austin McGee who has provided vital front-end input. We are all committed to continue advancing the state-of-the-art in our still niche and vastly underdeveloped—yet with such a huge potential—technological space. Looking ahead to 2025, I’m excited to continue making strides alongside our trusted scientific advisors and data partners, including Planet. Wishing everyone a calm and relaxing holiday season and a healthy and creative 2025.

Today, thanks to the explosive growth in #EarthObservation of the last two decades, we have access to a multitude of public and commercial satellites that can help us identify and map coastal ecosystems like #seagrasses. More recently, this growth has led to the development and broad deployment of lightweight #drones, creating a highly-flexible and diverse remote sensing toolkit. Choosing your remote sensing instrument can be challenging - often requiring a mixture of domain and technical expertise, but there are a number of parameters you can use to assess what the right choice or combination is: 🛰️ Spatial resolution (i.e. size of the pixel) 🛰️ Temporal resolution (i.e. frequency of acquisition) 🛰️ Spectral characteristics & resolution (i.e. number of bands and their spectral width across sensor's wavelengths) 🔘Geographical scale (i.e. area of interest) 💰 Cost of image(s) (e.g. available or tasked) The effect of varying spatial resolution of various optical remote sensing instruments (e.g. public and commercial satellites, and a very high-resolution drone), along with their pros and cons, are showcased in the image below, over a shallow seagrass meadow and sandy seabed in Lesvos, Greece. #Coastal ecosystems are inherently complex in terms of their environment, physiology and #ecology, and, most often, more than one phenomenology (i.e. modality) is required to map, measure and monitor them, across space and time, at high accuracy, inference and granularity. In Ocean Ledger, we are resolving these complexities by combining multi-modal (i.e. optical, radar, lidar) data-agnostic (in source, platform and resolution) analytics with AI, cloud computing, modelling and field data, both for onshore and underwater coastal ecosystems. Leveraging the full spectrum of #remotesensing technologies allows us to optimize our proprietary modular workflows and provide robust, standardized downstream insights.

The net benefit on average of investing in more resilient infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries would be $4.2 trillion - $4 in benefit for each $1 invested (World Bank/GFDRR). In the US, more than $1 trillion worth of property is located within 700 feet of the coast - in addition to critical #infrastructure (ports, railways). These are at risk of extreme weather events, #hurricanes, #sealevelrise, and high tide #flooding - which shatters local economies, lowers tax revenues, and diverts resources from public services. At Ocean Ledger, we equip those that own or operate physical assets with a #decision-making + #monitoring tool for coastal resiliency. We capture the full picture of risk - linking gradual geophysical #risks with sudden #perils (i.e storms) - factoring in the protective powers of #ecosystems (underwater & above-water). How? By fusing historical shoreline, underwater topography and ecosystem changes to analyse trends in #erosion, accretion, and stability - we can calculate net #shoreline change or impact at a physical asset & wider-area level. We then use this to #forecast #climate-change #scenarios (#flood-risk) business disruptions (navigation route disruption) and assess the efficacy of interventions (#nature-based or non-nature-based) to increase #coastalresiliency. The below image shows historical shoreline movement from 1986 to 2024, highlighting the visible impact of human-made sea defenses on coastal erosion and accretion patterns.

One of the most challenging endeavors in coastal ecosystem assessment is monitoring their change through time in a consistent, harmonized and accurate fashion. This is impacted by the: ❌Lack of spatiotemporally coincident reference and remote sensing data ❌Lack of pertinent scalable frameworks ❌Difficulties in harmonizing inter-sensor images across space and time, due to natural and technological variabilities ❌ Lack of multi-dimensionality to confidently characterize pertinent change and its drivers One of the greatest values and strengths of #EarthObservation technology is its standardized global historical cadence, from the 80s to today - the most harmonized, transparent, granular, and reliable global dataset. This allows quantitative trend analytics of coastal ecosystems, from seasonal to multi-decadal temporalities, and from single ecosystem and coastline to holistic #seascape and regional scales. In Ocean Ledger, we have developed proprietary change detection analytics using satellite archives, which act like time machines to track seasonal to interdecadal changes in coastal extent, health, condition and ecosystem services. These analytics are enhanced with customized pre-processing algorithms to reduce noise and focus on environmental signals (i.e. temporal change). To understand ecosystems, a blend of physical, compositional, structural, and functional typologies should be ideally utilized, from patch to landscape and seascape levels. Some of the rich plethora of typologies that we are measuring across space and time are: 🌊 Habitat patch cohesion 🌊 Distance to patch edge 🌊 Light attenuation Patch cohesion & distance to patch edge are landscape/seascape metrics that reflect ecosystem connectivity and fragmentation: e.g. larger contiguity supports better protection against grazing and hydrodynamics, and greater fish density, for seagrasses. On the other hand, light attenuation is an important physical indicator for underwater ecosystems due to its ability to characterize the water quality conditions in shallow waters, in which seagrasses and corals thrive. Spread across time, these metrics can enhance understanding of the trajectory of coastal ecosystem #biodiversity, condition and functioning for both onshore and nearshore ecosystems, allowing tracking progress on ecosystem recovery and restoration efforts. The below image showcases our application of this blend of remotely sensed typologies for the lush shallow seagrasses of the North Andros Island (The Bahamas), using a Sentinel-2 image time series. Real-world applications of change detection of coastal ecosystems and environments from space are: 🌊Showcasing biodiversity and #carbon uplift for crediting projects 🌊Tracking ecosystem condition for conservation and #restoration 🌊Identifying eroding and accreting coastal areas for infrastructure 🌊Empowering long-term forecasting and short-term triggers built around coastal environmental liability for insurers

One late August night in 1975, about 30 km NE from the depicted location (North Andros Island, The #Bahamas), Jacques Cousteau embarked on a three-week expedition to understand if the first two Landsat satellites could quantify the #depth of shallow coastal waters. On board the Calypso for the NASA-Cousteau Bathymetry Experiment, his research team successfully measured depths up to 22 m, over a bright seabed. This remarkable research campaign and its achieved depth penetration essentially gave birth to the field of #SatellitederivedBathymetry (SDB). The Bahamas covers more than 11.3 million ha of clear waters over its shallow white carbonate sand and limestone platform— principally due to the skeletal fragments of #corals—and features the largest continuous #seagrass extent globally. It is not only the first country in the world to include a measurable target in its national climate agenda to protect seagrasses, but also an ideal natural laboratory to train and scale state-of-the-art #EarthObservation analytics. And, just today, in exciting news, The Bahamas announced their debt for nature swap of $124 million. Nearly 50 years after the birth of SDB via the historical Landsat 1 & 2, our dedicated team of engineers in Ocean Ledger is fusing modern globally-aggregated optical and lidar satellite data to automatically measure bathymetry in the Bahamian coastal waters up to 25 m, with high scalability and confidence. High-resolution depth data and analytics can enable granular and transparent #naturalcapital accounting, #coastalerosion monitoring and #ecosystemservice modelling, towards more resilient and proactive #climate change adaptation and mitigation. Depicted is our 20-m resolution bathymetry product overlaid over its slope, showcasing the natural art of the rich bedforms, just offshore North Andros Island. Yellow & green colors represent shallower waters, purple represent deeper waters, and more pronounced color gradients represent larger seabed slopes.

𝟱𝟬 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗱𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝗻𝘃𝗶𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀: 5-m NICFI - Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative Planet mosaic of the broader Bombetoka Bay (NW Madagascar) - a global hot spot of coastal #bluecarbon and #biodiversity, but also wide-ranging #waterquality and #turbidity. This 113x49.6-km mosaic showcases the variability but also the arising challenges of coastal aquatic #remotesensing, especially in tropical waters and environments. Tropical coastal systems typically exhibit up to 90% of cloud coverage annually, which impedes traditional single image-based approaches. On top of cloud and, thus, cloud shadow impedances, persistent seasonal and yearlong turbidity - as the case of the depicted Bombetoka Bay - additionally blocks light penetration, further challenging high-confidence detection of any seabed property (e.g. seagrasses, corals, bathymetry). Bombetoka Bay has experienced a dramatic increase in sediment transport via the Betsiboka river during the past 30 years, which is being deposited in the estuary and the offshore delta lobes, among predominantly mangrove stands and coral reefs and seagrass meadows, onshore and nearshore, respectively. Broadly, along the west Madagascar coastline, the main composition of suspended sediments that shape water quality originates from laterites - iron and aluminum-rich rocks that are severely transformed by tropical weathering on the Madagascar highlands - turning the waters red. Other coastal environments of the world feature different hues (e.g. brown, yellow, green) depending on the nature of the #sedimentation and upstream source e.g. marine mud, fluvial sediments, nutrients and by-products of human activities. In addition to yearlong cloud and turbidity intensity, there are also other natural usual suspects that impede #EarthObservation-guided assessments of coastal waters, e.g. sunglint, waves, that are more pronounced in different wavelengths. The described natural complexities and challenges highlight the importance of the availability of near-daily high-resolution satellite imagery, like Planet's deep temporal archive, paired with suitable satellite tech analytics with suitable pre-processing and #analysisreadydata algorithms. But they also highlight the need to integrate #ecological and #geomorphological knowledge in large-scale spaceborne assessments to better characterize the trajectory, condition & ecology of coastal environments. Through the Planet's Startup Program, Ocean Ledger has access to near-daily high-resolution archive from 2014 to today, allowing us to flexibly toggle our analytics to resolve the aforementioned challenges in a purely automated and highly scalable fashion. This enables high-confidence granular historical, baseline and scenario analyses of coastal indicators, insights and risks through a unique fusion of remote sensing, cloud computing, biophysical modelling and field data. Image Credit: Planet Labs PBC

Depicted is an example of coastal erosion monitoring using multi-decadal U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat satellite time series (30m) at the Hog Inlet, near the border of North/South Carolina. This example showcases how Ocean Ledger can detect the growth of a shoreline through various sediment deposition phases, along with the erosion of the opposite shoreline, resulting in the documentation of the geomorphological evolution of this river outlet. 🌊 At the site-level, this monitoring is more rapid and cost-effective than traditional surveying, as well as physics-based modeling. Our output is an improvement upon open-source tools because our approach is purely automated via our proprietary, tide-standardised image pre-processing - you don't have to bring any data or train your own model. This ensures we can maximize the "signal" out of the noise - as in every remote sensing endeavour - and artifacts (clouds, waves, sunglint, and similar) that can impede coastal remote sensing-based analysis. 📈At the financial services level, current risk models do not incorporate gradual, coastal geomorphic or environmental change. But you get half the picture if you consider only hazardous events, many of which, like flood risk, is no longer hazardous but frequent, because of geomorphic environmental changes. Such changes should be updated in a frequent fashion alongside the external drivers of thd hazards, as these evolve. It's not about writing more policies - but about writing better policies and integrating granular analytics with risk management. 🔧From a tech POV, we uptake our historical erosion analytics and distill trends and actionable insights based upon past and current conditions - and go a step further by projecting future scenarios grounded in real-world data. We integrate this with our suite of holistic primary indicators of ecosystem, habitat and environmental conditions to better understand how natural solutions can mitigate, manage, and reduce risk, while promoting landscape resiliency. #ShorelineTracking #CoastalErosion #EcosystemDynamics #CoastalDevelopment #Insurance #StormProtection #EnvironmentalLiability #SeaLevelRise #Floods

In the past two days, I had the pleasure to visit Dubai representing Ocean Ledger in the Sustainable Coastal Development #MENA Forum, which was hosted by AD Ports Group. This first edition of the forum featured a rich plethora of speakers, panelists, commercial exhibitors, public agents, and national and international decision makers, from Fugro, GHD, Egis, AECOM, Jacobs, Boskalis, Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi (EAD), World Resources Institute. The participants discussed the critical challenges that the region faces under intensive coastal engineering and developments within the past two decades. Naturally, this heavily impacts the regional natural coastal environments (mangroves, seagrasses, corals): their extent, condition, healthy functioning and interconnectivity. Yet, environmental liability is hardly being accounted and integrated into all these giga projects - and when it is, it's more of a reactive measure, after catastrophic impacts of human action (and inaction) and pertinent regulations have taken place. Remote sensing can truly help drive more holistic and actionable environmental & economic accounting of coastal ecosystems by: 🌊 Identifying coastal areas and assets more prone to coastal erosion & ecosystem loss through granular historical and forecasting tools 🌊 Guiding less impactful marine construction by identifying hot spots of coastal nature-based solutions through spatially-explicit biodiversity and carbon accounting 🌊Enabling more proactive measures and interventions via scenario analysis of uplifting future scenarios of where and to what extent change will happen 🌊Reducing costs in climate mitigation and adaptation by informing the design & tracking the progress of marine ecosystem conservation, protection and restoration. Oil spills, eutrophication, accelerated sea surface temperatures, sea level rise and coastal erosion are all threatening Dubai, UAE, and the broader Arabian Gulf. However, an unprecedented opportunity arises to utilize new scalable innovative tools, like remote sensing, cloud computing and AI, fused with old & traditional ones, like in situ acoustic sensing systems, to holistically quantify these coastal risks. Only this way we can drive long-lasting and meaningful economic, societal and natural resilience, regionally and globally. Such novel tech and data blends and their positive impact into coastal monitoring and management was the theme of a workshop organized by Fugro, in which I also had the pleasure to actively engage with a diverse set of attendees, discussing how to overcome today's problems and barriers for tomorrow's decisions and actions. P.S. A big thanks to the Fugro Middle East team for the kind invitation to attend the forum and all the insightful and inspiring exchanges, especially Talia Sherrard Christoffel Botha!

🌊 🛩 The Ocean Ledger team is hitting the road! Join us at these upcoming events where we'll be engaging with organizations to learn, listen and contribute our expertise & capabilities. 🗺️ Our CEO Paige Roepers will be at: 🌎#Bloom24 & COP16 Colombia (Cali, Colombia) | Oct 25-29 ▶️Presenting in the Blue Zone as part of the Silverstrand Capital Biodiversity Showcase ▶️Attending Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance events in the Blue Zone: ▶️Climate Risks and Insurance Solutions with the Mesoamerican Reef Fund - MAR Fund (Oct 26) ▶️Blue Alliance Marine Protected Areas's & BNP Paribas's First Impact Loan Launch (Oct 27) ▶️Coastal Risk Index Launch (Oct 28) 🌎InsuranceERM Insurance Risk & Capital (Bermuda) | Oct 30 Sponsored by M&G Investments and Quantitative Risk Management. Meeting with re/insurers to discuss our coastal erosion models that integrate habitat presence/change for more accurate risk assessments that inherently value ecosystem services. ---- 🔬 Our Chief Scientific Officer Dimos Traganos, PhD will be at: 🌍Sustainable Coastal Development #MENA Forum (Dubai, UAE), hosted by AD Ports Group | Oct 30-31 Joining forces with industry leaders from Fugro, World Resources Institute, and EAD Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi to address critical challenges: ▶️Severe sand and sediment shortages affecting land reclamation ▶️Coastal development impacts on shoreline stability ▶️Infrastructure vulnerability to extreme weather ▶️Advanced solutions for shore erosion and corrosion 💡 Want to meet up with us? Reach out to Paige Roepers or Dimos Traganos, PhD to schedule a meeting during these events! #CoastalResilience #RiskManagement #OceanTech #NaturalCapitalAccounting #UNSEEA

In the last decade, we have experienced an explosive growth in Earth Observation, with numerous satellite launches creating a wealth of multi-modal EO data. More than 4,000 EO satellite launches are projected by 2032. But like every profit, this comes at a cost: this rich plethora of satellite data requires special pre-processing to become "analysis ready" (ARD) - a vital yet underrated subdomain in EO R&D: ▶️Vital, because it enables better precision, accuracy and standardization in downstream analytics and production  ▶️Underrated, due to the misconception that cloud-free satellite images simply fed into AI models will yield high accuracy and rich insights, at scale. Like milk undergoes pasteurization, packaging and storage at certain temperatures before reaching stores, raw satellite data must undergo an ARD-focused processing to be safe for ingestion. This processing reduces natural and technical obstacles impeding satellites' ability to "see" the Earth's land and seabed: e.g. clouds, cloud shadows, haze, waves, turbidity, sunglint, and intra&inter-sensor artifacts and inconsistencies—many things can go wrong and will go wrong, especially in coastal aquatic Earth Observation. Producing ARD and downstream products and insights is complex yet feasible today by blending deep satellite time series, big data analytics and cloud computing. At Ocean Ledger, we've developed a unique cloud-native ARD recipe which forms the foundation of our coastal natural capital accounting system. We transform raw cloudy pixels into clean ARD, quantifying bathymetry, habitat probabilities, and thematic maps of coastal ecosystems, from the onshore zone up to 30m deep - even in tropical coasts, covered 90% of the year by dense clouds. ARD production of multi-modal EO archives can accelerate and maintain the momentum in the growing EO industry, in the short and long term, respectively, through standardization, harmonization, and operationalization of EO pipelines and commercial endeavors. P.S. Shout-out to Joe Morrison for the inspiration on the common analogy of milk production to EO ARD. P.P.S. Also, we have a brand new website! https://lnkd.in/dBhm_Mnr. Feel free to request an analysis (top right corner) or get in touch with us for business & partnership enquiries. #EarthObservation #AnalysisReadydata #OceanLedger #Geospatial #Hydrographic